White Knight
White knight is a term used to describe someone who goes on the Internet to help or defend someone else on the Internet against other people on the Internet out of pity or compassion. White knighting of Kirlia is especially prevalent because of the unprecedented amount of abuse she has taken, which in turn is caused by Kirlia's total inability to heed the white knights in her life. Counter-trolls are those who take Kirlia's side to spite her legion of trolls. Some do this because trolling one gullible idiot is less satisfying than trolling trolls, who actually have the ability to understand what is going on. Others have decided that Kirlia has jumped the shark and are trying to make everyone else leave her alone to put a stop to an old meme. Counter-trolls are not to be confused with anti-trolls, who fight trolls in order to get closer to Kirlia and troll her themselves. A meta-topic within the broader Kirlia saga has been the merits of attempting to help Kirlia stop being such an epic lulzcow, and whether she is deserving of such assistance or even beyond help. The consensus on these forums is that Kirlia's sexism, homophobia, and narcissism make her beneath contempt; and that she has consistently refused to take advice given to her in good faith. White knights and counter-trolls are considered to be wasting everyone's time and trolls have little patience for them. Motives Pity Following the release of Kirlia's nude photograph, many people, including trolls, felt sorry for her. They had not expected it to be possible for her to be trolled so hard or for her to appear so shattered. Empathy The Internet is full of autistic people, woman-children, and self-absorbed morons. Many of them are right here, fascinated with Kirlia. All of them see something of themselves in her, whether it's her all-consuming need for companionship or her fervent belief that her life matters. A lot of white knights have made at least some of the mistakes Kirlia has made and have since wised up. They think they can help improve Kirlia by offering the benefit of their experience. The trolls are even worse people than Kirlia Another frequently heard line of reasoning is that the trolls have gone way too far, and have demonstrated that they're even worse than Kirlia, or at least equally pathetic. For example, Poppy's doxing of Kirlia outraged even trolls. And, of course, who really has no life here: Kirlia, or the people who obsessively document everything she does? Love? When Aidan began defending Kirlia, his reasoning was that he had a crush on Kirlia and wanted to impress her. That's some pretty powerful stuff right there. Reasons Against White-knighting Kirlia is beyond empathy Kirlia cannot put herself in your shoes or accept that you have been where she is. She has no "theory of mind": if you used to be as anger-fueled as she is today, in her mind the fact that you aren't anymore makes your experience inapplicable to her situation. To Kirlia, the fact you got over it and she hasn't yet makes the two cases entirely different. She doesn't want to solve her problems by trying what worked for yo u, she only wants you to pity her for having problems, until she magically dreams up her own solution. While some of this can be attributed to Kirlia's autism, a condition that often results in a lack of empathy, most autistics can at least learn how to express empathy through a combination of carefully reading the emotions of others and thinking about how a situation affects other people. Kirlia refuses to seek serious counseling or psychiatric help for this sort of thing - but that's another point. Autism does not excuse a terrible person Kirlia knows she has trouble understanding non-verbal social cues due to her autism, and yet she still jumps the gun on interpreting other people's intentions all the time. Autism, in and of itself, does not create a failure as massive as Ashley Shoemaker. A majority of autistics manage to get psychiatric help for their problem and/or are able to develop social and emotional skills so they can cope with their disability and lead rewarding and rich lives. Yet while Kirlia acknowledges she has a problem, she refuses to do anything about it. Kirlia is fully capable of understanding the consequences of her actions. She has a sense of morality (even if she often ignores it in favor of her own selfish interests). She would be held accountable for her own actions in a court of law (and rightfully so). The fact she is a sexist, a homophobe, and a bigot have nothing to do with her autism. Kirlia is beyond pity Kirlia is capable of doing some very bad things when provoked, which is a quite understandable (if not acceptable) response to trolling. However, "provocation" in this case doesn't necessarily mean harassment or trolling. Merely disagreeing with Kirlia or asking her why she does what she does can provoke an attack, up to and including threats of violence and death. When Kirlia is annoyed, frustrated, or overcome by desire or lust, she's capable of doing nasty things. Moreover, when Kirlia loses it, she doesn't think of the consequences of her actions at all, and her expressions of outrage are completely out of proportion to the provocation — often more outrageous in themselves than whatever the trolls did. Kirlia is not a good net citizen Kirlia is more concerned with getting lots of publicity than being a good net citizen. She has adopted the mentality that most spammers have adopted: who cares about things like terms of service and account suspensions and masses of pissed-off people as long as her message gets through? She won't participate in the communities of the sites she posts on, the only exception being DeviantArt. This is not mere passivity in those communities, which might still be tolerable; she deliberately opposes such participation. Most people, while not bothering to contribute to communities, would not at least make deliberate efforts to hinder the community. On YouTube, she disabled all comments on her channel, probably because she knew she'd mostly get negative comments about her terrible sprite videos anyway — yet this ignores the fact that open commenting is part of the nature of the site and disabling comments should be done only if it's being clearly used for flagrant abuses of the system, like spam and votebotting. She regards YouTube purely as a video publishing venue and not as a tool for engaging in discussion with her boot-lickers. Kirlia's behavior on FanPop provides many more examples of her selfish attitude. She didn't seem to understand that the website she was on is built purely on community participation, but only saw it as another outlet to get back at her enemies. Kirlia will reject your advice Someone carefully explained to Kirlia why Violet was getting banned. In response, Kirlia got angry. She is only interested on how to unban her cousin without making any changes in the slightest. Look at Dark the Hedgehog. Dark actually used to be a white knight, and warned Kirlia several times that she was only making things worse for herself. Kirlia didn't listen. He then tried to talk some sense into her. But Kirlia proved to be so stubborn, he actually tossed the towel and became a troll out of spite. Not only has he long since joined the troll ranks, but Kirlia even began berating and sending threats to her biggest white knight ever. Kirlia asks for it, and always recovers Hellbent on spreading her version of the truth because she's TRUE and HONEST, Kirlia cannot realize that her warring on various sites was practically a squeal begging for more trolling. TMI is a tactic Kirlia uses that usually leads to her abusing herself. Since Kirlia insists on revealing details of her life to everyone she meets (did you know that she blew three guys? Dark said she told him herself!), the trolls always get more information to fuel further acts of trolling. White knights cannot stop our hero from being Honest. Kirlia doesn't get embarrassed either. Oh, her nudes and lewd acts are all over the internet? No big deal! As long as her parents don't find out, what's the problem? Kirlia managed to fully recover from the banning of her cousin mentioned above (and quite quickly, too) and proceeded to fail even harder for months. Likewise, despite professing great emotional distress, she bounced back from being destroyed on FanPop in a matter of hours. So what's the problem? Kirlia made herself an outcast For most people, you are given only one chance to become a functioning part of internet society. They gave Kirlia an even greater chance because she's autistic. They lent her a friendly, caring hand and opened themselves to her friendship, males and females alike. And what did Kirlia do? She refused, by choice, to associate with anyone who didn't suck up to her. Now, it's too late for Kirlia. She was given a friendly hand, but she angrily bit it, and that hand will never reach out to her again. She doesn't even belong in her domain anymore. She spends most of her time in exile in one of her elaborate fantasy lands, the one and only place still open to her, and that place doesn't even exist. The trolling will not cease We think this one speaks for itself. The trolling helps Kirlia, and indeed, others If Kirlia were just some random nobody on the Internet, she'd be doing nothing but drawing pictures and making unsellable stories until her parents died. Then she'd be institutionalized. She'd remain without social skills, a virgin all her life, with no job, success or future. Instead, Kirlia's antics have become a cultural phenomenon that — without exaggeration — is something extraordinary, unique, and which has rarely been replicated in any shape or form in modern history. Kirlia has secured her place among such luminaries as Chris-Chan and Bludshot the Hedgehog. Kirlia interacting with the world through her websites and DeviantArt has drawn in a crowd of people who are participating in an unprecedented, continual piece of performance art of a kind that was unheard of only a few years ago. She brings entertainment to thousands of people all over the world, an accomplishment that most could never dream of achieving — the kind of thing that would give Dane Cook a stiffy just to consider. Her Internet fame is actually a sort of success in its own right, and may bring her further success. There are many people out there that are so fascinated by her that they study her life on a daily basis. One could argue that if Kirlia eventually "retired" from this comedy act by actually coming to terms with her problems, seeking professional help, and completely reforming (and selling media rights to her life's story to the highest bidder, like all sensible people would do), she could live the rest of her life secure and probably moderately wealthy. The troll audience would give her a standing ovation for entertaining them for as long as she did, and move on to the next piece of tragicomedy brought to us by the emerging Web technologies. We have seen far more messed-up celebrity stories already; Kirlia's tale is at least quite different from the norm and far more engaging. What's more, the trolls provide her with an actual social outlet to learn and grow in life. Instead of being an unemployable, fat, virgin bedroom-dweller that nobody has ever heard of, she's an Internet-famous unemployable, fat, virgin bedroom-dweller and this by itself increases her chances of getting friends and a man. She may even end up employed, too, probably appearing in an advertisement or sponging off royalties from any biographical medium, whether it be a book, movie, or TV series. She could become the next William Hung if she put half an ounce of effort into it. Also, Kirlia's constant failure at life has inspired hundreds to self-improvement. Really, she's accomplishing a pretty good thing here. Examples Among the most notable of Kirlia's white knights is a netizen by the name of Malik Watson. Via his many accounts on social websites, all named McSlurpi, he has gone so far to threaten the trolls the same way Kirlia would. Were Mr. Watson less thick-skulled and Kirlia even slightly willing to accept irrefutable evidence, he may have made somewhat of a negative impact on the organized trolling effort against Kirlia. Ultimately, though, he was ineffectual. He also seems to have somewhat of an obsession with Poppy, the co-founder of the KirliaxGyroClub and the founder of this wiki. Another one by the name of Cameron the Fox is a notable example as well. He is known for whining a lot, as well as declaring war on one of Kirlia's trolls by the name of Agovoman. He also once got into a fight over one of Kirlia's detractors here. Despite being a Kirlia white knight, Cameron proved he could at least take criticism after SonTurn commentated on him , editing the original sprite video and promising changes in his sprite series. = Wait, they have wiki pages of us? When this site went up, we knew that it would attract white knights. And attract them it did. At first we thought they would go for the site itself, vandalizing the articles to make Kirlia sound oh-so-amazingly-perfect and make the horrible-meanie-bully-jerk-trolls sound oh-so-ebveeel. To stop this, we protected many of our key articles. Obviously, we must be psychic because soon, the white knights found us. Starting with Cameron, and then an anonymous user (who might well be Cameron again)- they commented on Kirlia's main page on this site. The last two comments (both by Cameron) were edited by Poppy (the 'I am a gay failure' comment) and SonTurn (the 'I love to fuck the angry birds' comment) respectively- leading to Cameron's defeat. But not only did the white knights find the site- they decided to somewhat rub it in our faces by copying and pasting information from our trolls page to adress us in a 'pwease stop buwlying our oh-so-perfwect Kirwia' message that was sent to our site admins- weither it was on the wiki or on deviantART. One such example can be seen here~ We would like to remind you that SonTurn's brain was not damaged in any way during the reading or screenshotting of this picture. However, since her computer died after she assembeled this, SonTurn had to retake all her screenshots. Conclusion As good as your intentions may be, there is no conceivable way any mortal human alive can reach Kirlia and change her for the better. Your efforts will unfortunately fail, and she will just brush you aside, seeing no difference between you and the trolls. Nothing short of divine intervention, revelation, or a horrifyingly close brush with death will change her. You would be best to leave her be and find something else to do with your time. All we can do is hope that one of the three aforementioned scenarios happen at some point, though the first two seem highly unlikely. Category:Trolls